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On the verge of building the first real submarine
Emerging out of the American Civil War we find a massive doing and much progress in the field of submarine construction. Over the next 4 decades a number of different submarine designs evolved in various European countries.
1863 A French team with their Le Plongeur- 140 feet long and more then 400 ton of displacement powered by engines running on compressed air.
1877-1881 During and after the Russo-Turkish War, Russian inventor, Stefan Karlovich Dzhavetskiy constructed his No.1 and No.2 prototypes and 50 units of his No.3 submersible ordered by the Russian government.
1885 The American Josiah A.L. Tuck launched his Peacemaker powered by chemical (fireless) boiler, this to avoid the problem of providing oxygen for combustion.
1885-87 The Swedish company Nordenfeldt built a few submarine, according to Thorsten Nordenfeldt design, for different European countries:
- Nordenfeldet I for Greece 64 feet long, 60-ton displacement
- Nordenfeldet II for Turkey 100 feet long, 160-ton displacement
- Nordenfeldet III for Russia 123 feet long, 245-ton displacement
1888 Maxim Laubeuf in France Built the Naraval 188 feet long displacing 136 ton and also in France at the same year Gustav Zede Built the Gymnote 60 feet, 30 ton and the Gustav Zede 148 feet, 266 ton.
But the two most out standing designers of the time were the Americans Simon Lake, with his family of Argonauts and the Irish-American John P. Holland, with the different types of Hollands evolving to be later on the backbone of the US and Royal Navy fleet of submarines.
Maybe the most famous submarine of that era was the fictional Nautilus created (1870) by the French novelist Jules Verne in his Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.
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